Is Depoliticized Propaganda Effective?

• In Event: Propaganda and Influence Campaign Operations

Abstract

How information technologies liberate or rather, empower authoritarian regimes has received growing attention. Existing research shows that autocrats use digital technologies to suppress, distract, monitor, and manipulate public opinion, while the other strand of literature suggests governments use new media to respond to public demands. A prevailing yet largely overlooked phenomenon is depoliticization, that state-owned media and governmental social media accounts trying to distract people from politics. In China, for example, state media shift both the contents and the way of expression of their broadcast from political ones to depoliticized ones. On state social media accounts, along with political news, state media also broadcast depoliticized contents like entertainments and lifestyle tips. Meanwhile, in broadcast of traditionally political contents, state media adopt a more depoliticized style of expression – making use of listicles, slangs, pronouns and exclamation marks.

By blending political news with entertainment and reporting political news in depoliticized tones, this strategy of media convergence changes supply of political information, and may discourage deliberation in public sphere, while harvesting patriotic support through emotional appeals. Digital authoritarianism is not all about surveillance and censorship, while depoliticization may serve as a sophisticated system of information control, leaving little need for censorship or potential for democratization.

But is depoliticized propaganda effective? With an experimental design, this research studies whether depoliticized propaganda causally changes perceptions, political attitudes and political participations of ordinary citizens. As one of the first delineating depoliticized propaganda as the depoliticized contents and depoliticized ways of expressions, this project aims at the causal identification of the local impact of the depoliticized shift of both contents and expressions on viewership and subscription of state media social accounts, and further on political attitudes and participation. Finally, as the literature has largely ignored, we will also estimate the global effects of depoliticized propaganda -- how viewership and subscription as well as political attitudes and participation might change, had all state media migrated from politicized propaganda to a depoliticized propaganda.

Existing literature, such as Lu and Pan (forthcoming), shows the positive association between the use of clickbaits and viewership for state social media accounts despite with a focus on the depoliticized style of expression. However, it is still unclear how the other aspects of depoliticized propaganda may affect the subscription and viewership of state media. Meanwhile, a research gap linking subscription and viewership and perceptions, political attitudes, and further political participation also exists. Further, no estimation of the global causal effects of such transition into depoliticized propaganda has ever been reported. That is, how viewership of and subscription to state media as well as political attitudes and participation might change, had all state media migrated from politicized propaganda to a depoliticized propaganda.

The change in political participation and the global effects of depoliticized propaganda are more substantively important than subscription and viewership, because the local increase of subscription might not translate into behavioral change in the real world or even over the Internet. Further, by drawing apolitical audience into political news, depoliticized propaganda might even backfire, if the exposure to political news of apolitical citizens produce negative impacts on their confidence.

In this project, we design a three-stage randomized experiment, which causally captures, respectively, the behavioral change of respondents on subscription, viewership, and finally attitudes and participation. With conditional probabilities estimated from the three stages, we back-out the global effects of depoliticized propaganda. With probability of subscription, conditional probabilities of viewership on subscription, and change of behavior conditional on viewership, we estimate the subscription, viewership, political attitudes and participation under three hypothetical scenarios – with only traditional state media, with only depoliticized state media, with a mix of traditional and depoliticized state media, which we call the estimation of global effects.

Preliminary evidence from college students shows a local increase in subscription to depoliticized state media accounts, but not an increased viewership of depoliticized news articles, yet a decreased effort to read more after exposure to the depoliticized article and an increased perception for contents reported. We also observe no difference in terms of political participation. The enumeration of the experiment on a nationally representative online sample is underway.

Authors

• Shiyao Liu, New York University Abu Dhabi

• Kaiping Zhang, Tsinghua University